A Brief Introduction to Arakawa and Madeline Gins

Martin E. Rosenberg, Kettering University


The collaboration between Arakawa (Shusaku Arakawa) and Madeline Gins began in the early 1960’s, when they met as Painting Fellows at the Brooklyn Museum. Arakawa came to America from Japan in 1961, soon becoming one of the most influential members of the conceptual art movement of that time. Giving up painting to collaborate with Arakawa, Madeline Gins established herself independently as a leading poet through such works as Word Rain or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says (1969), What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984), and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Friends of Marcel Duchamp, they quickly developed their own identity, establishing an international reputation for straddling discursive boundaries in startling ways. Stimulated by readings in Eastern and Western philosophy, physics, cognitive studies and aesthetics, and yet often prefiguring recent and profound conceptual transformations in these fields, Arakawa and Gins have searched, individually and collectively, for a poetics and aesthetics that might transform the way a human being experiences itself embedded in the world.

The situated nature of verbal and non-verbal signs, and the hidden world of abstracted conceptual structures became the focus for their first major collaboration, The Mechanism of Meaning 1963-73). With trenchant wit anticipating many of the conceptually subversive moves associated with the academic post-structuralist moment, as well as fundamental principles of what we now call cognitive science, Arakawa and Gins’ pun-infused graphical images challenged received understandings of the nature of cognition, the relationship between subject and object, and the distributed nature of human consciousness that participates in these conceptual structures.

Since 1971, they have committed themselves to the field of architectural design, for heuristic as well as for transformative reasons, to confront phenomenologically and to situate socially the embodied and yet distributed nature of human consciousness in a world of irreversible time. From their Reversible Destiny Project (1971-present), to their most recent (as yet) unpublished (Architectural Body/Architecting Organism), Arakawa and Gins seek to build sites that can reverse the destiny of an all-too-destructive humanity. They have done so through the visionary deployment of design features in projects ranging from installations (Ubiquitous Site*Nagi’s Ryoanji* Architectural Body, 1992-4, Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art), to individual residences (on Long Island—in process), to parks (Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro, 1993-95, Gifu Prefecture, Japan), to their retrospective (and magnificent catalogue) at the Guggenheim Soho (1997). Continuing to add to their list of invited lectures, shows and installations now approaching a thousand all over the globe, they have master , and plans (currently under negotiation in Japan) for "real estates" encompassing whole communities in  Tokyo Bay, Kochi (Shikoku) ,and East Fishkill, New York.

While the overtones oftheir project will resonate with SLS membership’s exploration of trends in contemporary physics and cognitive science, they have their own discourse which will need to be heard on its own terms.